It’s here! My Chinese language standup! Take a look!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSh2KdiNuzs
(Youku version: http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNTcyMzA1MDY0.html)
The last few weeks I’ve been thinking a lot about stand-up comedy in China. It’s been a journey that’s led me to ask a lot of questions both of myself and my Chinese friends, but it’s yielded some fun times, some nervous moments, and some great knowledge about Chinese culture and comedy.
Stand-up exists here, though it goes by the name of “Talk Show” and is probably more reminiscent of the first part of the Letterman show or Jay Leno than of someone like George Carlin. There’s more emphasis on short stories that last about a minute or so and ending in a punch line, and it tends to be delivered in a more “TV host” style. But there isn’t a whole lot of standup in China in a broader sense, and the art is still just getting its feet under it here.
Still, it’s a fantastic means for discovering what Chinese people think is funny. The reason is this: Stand-up, at its root, has to do with leading an audience member down a path, and then reversing their expectation at the last moment in order to get a punch-line.
Normally, standup comedians look at the world searching for these moments of insight, where they see some aspect of life that lends itself to not being noticed at first, allowing them to surprise the audience. The classic Mitch Hedberg joke shows this well: “Rice is great when you’re hungry and you want to eat two thousand of something.” We get led down the “things you do when you’re hungry” path in our head, and then get that path reversed with a witty observation.
When I began studying Chinese comedy, I knew I would need to see the world through Chinese eyes in order to understand what’s funny—use my “Chinese sense of humor.” This much was obvious. Less obvious was that I would need to continue using my “Chinese sense of humor” to explain the background concepts behind the joke in the first place. Coming up with a Chinese punchline was not enough: I need to know the logical path behind how Chinese people arrive at the joke so I can lead them down that path in the first place.
This means that for every observational joke I come up with, I need to step back and ask myself: Would a Chinese person have seen what I just saw there? A lot of foreign comedians in China have their jokes fall flat with the locals because their material doesn’t pass this step. An “interesting observation” to a foreigner in China is likely to be banal to the Chinese: the “crazy drivers” on the road seem less crazy because they’re all that anyone living here has ever known. If the joke were viewed through Chinese eyes, telling a story about nearly being hit by a car is not in itself shocking.
This leads me to look for subjects for my comedy that Chinese people themselves will find interesting. I ask myself not “Is that strange?” but “Will Chinese people think that that’s strange?” This process yields much more workable material.
Armed with such observations, every comic needs to then find a way of communicating this to the audience—the “leading down the path” part of the joke. Every comedian is always looking for the best way to pitch their jokes, but those of us doing comedy in another culture have to take an additional step. We need to know not only what people observe, but how they observe it.
For instance, I was trying to make a joke about something that happened on Chinese Weibo, or twitter. I live in China, and like hundreds of millions of others that do, I have a Weibo account and use it. So I figured a Weibo reference would be a good thing to bring up, as it is a Chinese site that Chinese people use, and therefore my observation might be more understandable from the Chinese point of view.
I felt happy with myself for this idea, which I thought meant I was respecting this “take a step back and see it as the Chinese do” approach to communicating my jokes. But when I tried the joke for some of my Chinese friends, they didn’t laugh. Most of them just squinted at me. “Are you referring to that Weibo joke?” they asked.
I was crushed. Of course I was! I was onstage performing for you!
It turns out they were 95% sure that I was making the joke—but not 100% sure, and that little trepidation ruined the joke. The reason: Chinese people know that Chinese people use Weibo, but they don’t think foreigners do. So when a white person goes up onstage and throws out a Weibo joke, people aren’t expecting it, and they miss it for a moment. That moment can, in some cases, kill the joke.
That moment awakened me to the fact that not only do I need to know how a Chinese person would find out about their jokes, I need to find out how Chinese people think a foreigner might find out that Chinese people found out about a joke. Talk about meta.
The trick, I think, is finding topics where my foreignness, rather than being something I need to explain away, is something of use to me. This doesn’t mean stammering onstage and talking about times I didn’t understand Chinese culture. Rather, the audience makes assumptions about the way I see the world, and then view my performance through that lens. I can use that to my advantage, if I understand what they think that I think when introducing a topic.
So meta.
I tried to make use of this idea in the performance I linked above. Consider the part where I discuss ordering food at a Chinese restaurant with my dad. The audience laughs double hard when I yell for the waiter, because while yelling itself is funny, they also know that in America, I would NOT yell for the waiter. They know (or assume to know) my lens, and meet me halfway by engaging with it. Then, in the second part of the piece, when I talk about how we do order food in America, I all of a sudden can make use of my American-ness to assert authority that “this is how it’s done.” It helps that there already exists a cultural concept that American food-ordering culture is different, so I can build off of that rather than introducing a whole new concept.
It’s been a really interesting journey trying to understand how to perform comedy for Chinese people in a new way. I hope to keep doing more standup and plumbing these mysterious depths. The depths of…. META-COMEDY!!
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